2020 was a bit of a breakout year for the team and Kattar in particular. After a strong 2019, Kattar took advantage of his biggest stage and knocked out Jeremy Stephens with a hellacious elbow when UFC got its schedule restarted with UFC 249. He followed that with a main event victory over Dan Ige just a couple months later on Fight Island and parlayed those wins into a main event spot on ABC against former champion Max Holloway. Although Kattar lost that fight, it proved that the team as a whole was not only on the rise, but here to stay.
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With Font days away from performing on the largest stage of his career, Kattar has slipped into the role of supportive teammate.
“We’re constantly pulling the best out of each other, getting ourselves in the gym, back to work because we know that without that, results don’t come,” Kattar said. “They don’t happen. We just try to force each other to level up, put in the work. I benchmark a lot of times and a lot of things I’m doing off of Rob Font. I know he’s one of the hardest working, not only in the division, but in the UFC, and so if I can do that, then I know I’ll be ready to take on whoever they put me in there with. He’s like the Energizer Bunny. He doesn’t stop. He’s constantly putting in the work and outperforming, outworking everyone in the gym, and that translates to fight night.”
It’s a long way from when the team got together. Although Chartier has worked with Font since the beginning, Kattar was a different story. Chartier met Kattar on the set of Here Comes The Boom and extended an invite to come train with them. At the time, Kattar was in the midst of a three-year layoff as he ran the regional promotion Combat Zone, which he still owns, but he and Font were aware of each other because they were essentially the area’s two top featherweights. They figured, at some point, they would end up fighting one another.